(Mass Tort Nexus Media) Litigation against OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP and the rest of the Opioid Big Pharma industry just jumped significantly, as six more states have filed lawsuits against Purdue Pharma, et al. The ongoing allegations against the opioid pharmaceutical industry as a whole, where numerous governmental entities from across the country have asserted that the opiate makers have fueled a national opioid crisis. This is primarily based on corporate boardroom designed deceptive opioid marketing campaigns, designed to sell prescription opioids, and minimize the previously well-known medical risks, including addiction and overdose, while generating billions of dollars in sales.

Texas saw 1,186 opioid-related deaths in 2015, while the nation as a whole had 33,000 such deaths that year. Researchers have flagged opioids as one possible factor in Texas’ staggering rise in women’s deaths during and shortly after pregnancy.

State attorneys general of Nevada, Texas, Florida, North Carolina, North Dakota and Tennessee assert that Purdue Pharma violated state consumer protection laws by falsely denying or downplaying the addiction risk while overstating the benefits of opioids. The lawsuits also names pharmaceutical manufacturers Endo Pharmaceuticals, Allergan, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and Mallinckrodt, as well as drug distributors AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson Corporation.

“It’s time the defendants pay for the pain and the destruction they’ve caused,” Florida State Attorney General Pam Bondi told a press conference.

Medical professionals say a shift in the 1990s to “institutionalize” pain management opened the doors for pharmaceutical companies to encourage doctors to massively increase painkiller prescriptions, and Purdue Pharma led that effort. Which is now directly linked to the massive increase in drug overdoses, now see as the leading cause of accidental death for Americans under age 50, killing more than 64,000 people in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

OxyContin was launched in the mid-90s by Purdue Pharma and aggressively marketed as a safe way to treat chronic pain. But it created dependency in many even as prescribed, and the pills were easy to abuse. Mass overprescribing has led to an addiction and overdose catastrophe across the US, more recently rippling out into rising heroin and fentanyl deaths.

Opioid overdoses made up a staggering 66 percent of all drug overdose deaths in 2016, surpassing the annual number of lives lost to breast cancer.

Florida and the other states also, named drug makers Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc., Allergan, units of Johnson & Johnson and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, and Mallinckrodt, as well as drug distributors AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. The distributors played a part in opioid abuse through oversupply, including failing to identify suspicious orders and report them to authorities, including the DEA and other oversight agencies, contributing to an illegal secondary market in prescription opioids, such as Purdue’s OxyContin, Endo’s Percocet and Insys Therapeutics fentanyl drug Subsys, a fast acting and extremely addictive drug.

Teva, in a statement, emphasized the importance of safely using opioids, while AmerisourceBergen said it was committed to collaborating with all stakeholders to combat opioid abuse.

The Healthcare Distribution Alliance, an umbrella group for drug distributors, said in a statement that accusations that distributors were responsible for the abuse of opioid prescriptions defied common sense and lacked understanding of the pharmaceutical supply chain.

BILLIONS IN PROFITS

The pharmaceutical industry spent a vast $6.4 billion in “direct-to-consumer” advertisements to hype new drugs in 2016, according tracking firm Kantar Media. That figure has gone up by 62% since 2012, Kantar Media says. This number may seem large at first but compared to the multi-billions in yearly profits just by opioid manufacturers over the last 15 years, the numbers is small. Corporate earnings have risen every year since the push to increase opioid prescriptions in every way possible, to became an accepted business model in Big Pharma boardrooms across the country.

THE SACKLERS AND PURDUE

Lawsuits have already been filed by 16 other U.S. states and Puerto Rico against Purdue and the related opioid drug companies and distributors. Purdue, which is a privately held company, owned by the Sackler brothers and family, in February said it stopped promoting opioids to physicians after widespread criticism of the ways drugmakers market highly addictive painkillers.

Purdue Pharma is owned by the Sackler family, listed at 19th on the annual Forbes list of wealthiest families in the country at a worth of $13 billion. The family’s fortune largely comes from OxyContin sales, which its company branded and introduced as an extended release painkiller in 1995.

Two branches of the Sackler family control Purdue, which developed and continues to make OxyContin, the narcotic prescription painkiller regarded as the “ground zero” of America’s opioids crisis.

Bondi said state attorneys general from New York, California and Massachusetts were preparing similar lawsuits, with Massachusetts last week sending a letter to Purdue notifying the company of its intention to sue. The California and New York attorney general offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stamford, Connecticut-based Purdue, in a statement, denied the accusations, saying its drugs were approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and accounted for only 2 percent of all opioid prescriptions, seemingly ignoring the 600 lawsuits filed against them in the last year, as well as the minimum of 15 federal and state criminal investigations that are underway across the country. At the forefront of the criminal investigations is the U.S. Attorney, John H. Durham, District of Connecticut, U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division, based in New Haven, CT the state which is also where Purdue Pharma is headquartered, who is leading a multi-group task force looking into the potential criminal conduct of not only Purdue, but the entire Opiate Big Pharma industry as a whole.

“We are disappointed that after months of good faith negotiations working toward a meaningful resolution to help these states address the opioid crisis, this group of attorneys general have unilaterally decided to pursue a costly and protracted litigation process,” Purdue said.

Opioids were involved in more than 42,000 overdose deaths in 2016, the last year for which data was available, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Kentucky, one of the nation’s hardest-hit states, lost more than 1,400 people to drug overdoses that year.

Separate litigation involving at least 433 lawsuits by U.S. cities and counties were consolidated in a federal court in Cleveland, Ohio. The defendants include Purdue, J&J, Teva, Endo, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson. The federal litigation is growing daily see, Opiate Prescription MDL 2804, US District Court of Ohio link.

The federal lawsuits which accuse drugmakers and the opioid industry as a whole, of deceptively marketing opioids and the distributors of ignoring indications that the painkillers were being diverted for improper uses.

U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing the consolidated litigation, has been pushing for a global settlement. He had previously invited state attorneys general with cases not before him to participate in those talks, from the start of the MDL 2804 litigation being assigned to his courtroom.

Despite filing separate lawsuits, the six attorneys general on Tuesday said they would continue to engage in settlement discussions with Purdue and other companies. “You always want to settle and prevent a prolonged litigation,” said Florida’s Bondi. “But we’re sending a message that we’re fully prepared to go to war.”

PURDUE-OXYCONTIN HISTORY

On December 12, 1995, the Food and Drug Administration approved the opioid analgesic OxyContin. It hit the market in 1996. In its first year, OxyContin accounted for $45 million in sales for its manufacturer, Stamford, Connecticut-based pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma. By 2000 that number would balloon to $1.1 billion, an increase of well over 2,000 percent in a span of just four years. Ten years later, the profits would inflate still further, to $3.1 billion. By then the potent opioid accounted for about 30 percent of the painkiller market. What’s more, Purdue Pharma’s patent for the original OxyContin formula didn’t expire until 2013. This meant that a single private, family-owned pharmaceutical company with non-descript headquarters in the Northeast controlled nearly a third of the entire United States market for pain pills.

OxyContin’s ball-of-lightning emergence in the health care marketplace was close to unprecedented for a new painkiller in an age where synthetic opiates like Vicodin, Percocet, and Fentanyl had already been competing for decades in doctors’ offices and pharmacies for their piece of the market share of pain-relieving drugs. In retrospect, it almost didn’t make sense. Why was OxyContin so much more popular? Had it been approved for a wider range of ailments than its opioid cousins? Did doctors prefer prescribing it to their patients?

During its rise in popularity, there was a suspicious undercurrent to the drug’s spectrum of approved uses and Purdue Pharma’s relationship to the physicians that were suddenly privileging OxyContin over other meds to combat everything from back pain to arthritis to post-operative discomfort. It would take years to discover that there was much more to the story than the benign introduction of a new, highly effective painkiller.

US DEPT OF JUSTICE INDICTMENTS

While the FDA has failed, the US Department of Justice has launched a massive crackdown on opiate drug makers including indictments of company executives, sales & marketing personnel as well as the doctors and pharmacies that have enabled the flood of easy access narcotics into the US market for over 15 years. The question is “how and why” did the FDA drop the ball or was this an intentional lack of enforcement and oversight by the FDA and other agencies due to Big Pharma influence over Congressional members who would blunt any true oversight of drug companies.

“FORMER PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON SPEAKS TO THE OPIATE CRISIS ISSUES”

Former President Bill Clinton pulled no punches as he focused directly on the opiate issues “Nobody gets out of this for free,” which seems to be where most of the finger pointing and blame game rests, which is one of the prime issues of the highest importance. The checkbook to pull the country out of this national opiate epidemic will be in the hundreds of billions of dollars and even then, the costs of social and economic damage to date, will never be recovered. Clinton further commented on how the opioid epidemic “creeps into every nook and cranny of our country” and needs to be addressed as both a huge national problem and a community-by-community tragedy, adding “this can rob our country of the future.”

RURAL vs. BIG CITY OPIATES

Almost 2.75 million opioid prescriptions were filled in New York City each year from 2014 to 2016. Which is a very high number for a major city, but not nearly the millions of opiate prescriptions written in the more rural regions of Ohio, West Virginia and Kentucky, where the number of opiates prescribed equaled 100 plus pills per month for every resident in these states, with West Virginia numbers being, 780 million painkillers prescribed in six years.

As more and more cities, states and counties files suits against the opiate drug industry as a whole, there will be a point where Opiate Big Pharm will have to decide whether to admit it’s fault in the opioid crisis, or simply continue to evade responsibility and leave the process up to lawyers and the courts to assign a financial penalty for the alleged corporate opioid abuses.

FDA Failed to Cite Opioid Big Pharma

Perhaps a look at former US Representative Tom Price, will provide insight into how our lawmakers work within the healthcare industry. Rep. Price was appointed by President Trump to head the Department of Health and Human Services, which the FDA reports to, was forced to resign as HHS head due to various transgression within 6 months of being appointed, as well as leaks that while a sitting congressman he enacted a bill favoring a medical device makers extension of a multi-year government contract. Not only did Price enact the bill, he purchased stock in the company prior to the bill introduction and secured a massive profit on the stock price increase after the contract extension was announced. In normal business circles this is considered “insider trading” and is illegal, but when you’re one of those people in charge of creating the rules and regulations, there’s an apparent “get out of jail card” that comes with your congressional seat.

As long as the US Congress fails to correct the lack of oversight by the FDA and other regulatory agencies into what and how dangerous drugs and products are placed into the US marketplace, there will always be bad drugs entering the healthcare pipeline in the United States, with the now enduring default misnomer of “Profits Before Patients” firmly in place in boardrooms and within our government.

As the Opioid litigation expands across the country in both state and federal courtrooms, it remains to be seen if the anticipated payouts will surpass the $200 billion payday for governments in the 1998 Big Tobacco Litigation settlement.

What remains to be seen is where and how the directly affected “individuals” who were prescribed millions of addictive opiates and subsequently became addicted and where thousands more overdosed and died, remains to be seen.

Who will be the advocate to make sure that these individuals as well as their children, families and communities as a whole are placed on the road to recovery. Historically, Big Pharma is not an industry to put the best interests of the paying consumer at the forefront of their agendas.